Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Met: Egypt

The ancient Egyptian precincts of the Met are arguably its largest, spanning 3,000 years or so of continuous history and resulting from numerous Met-sponsored digs. We did the Egypt tour on September 30th, then lingered, and then have returned several times for assorted bits and pieces previously missed. It's that large. It is no help that ancient Egyptian art changed little over the long course of its history. Vicki is the resident Egyptologist here, having visited Egypt in 1982, and also having visited Highclere Castle--home and museum of Lord Carnavon--at least three times. She is fond too of the recent Mummy movie series, the lead female character of which is a librarian. My total knowledge of ancient Egyptian history, culture, religion, etc., comes from Boris Karloff movies

The pix below are not in chronological order, since the tour skipped around a bit, and then we skipped around a bit too, back-filling. All dates and dynasties are BCE. As other, later pix from the Egyptian division emerge, I'll add them in a second post.

Writing on the wall

Standard pose, kilt; no bagpipes

Discoveries from a Met dig, tomb goods; for use in the Afterlife

Actual items; several rooms thereof

Also small boats and crews for use in the Afterlife

Photo from the dig of this stuff

Mummy body bag

Quite a few of these

Implements, tools

Mirrors, jewelry, etc.

Toiletries case

Beautiful gold work

In one of the several large format rooms; all pharaohs; the chin hair is a give-away

Chin-hair=pharaoh; ankh=god, key to Underworld

The Temple of Dendur, in its special humongous display hall facing
Central Park; the Temple was a gift from Egypt to the US in recogntion
of America's help with the Aswan high dam...flooding from which
was going to bury/destroy many such monuments; Egypt specified it
had to be on view 24x7

Dendur is actually a temple from the Roman era; that's Caesar
Augustus (right) paying homage to Isis and Osiris

Colorized version

Temple guardian

Closer up

19th century graffiti


More graffiti

Interesting foot gear concept

Ancient Egyptian linen; seriously; the desert is great for preserving
some things

Note shabti in the box left; your servants that will
spring to lfe...in the by and by....


Thousands upon thousands of items

And thousands

Toy game

The wig is contemporary but the hair-net thing is ancient

Another boat for getting around in the Afterlife

Interior of an actual tomb, removed and reconstructed from Egypt



Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Guggenheim

Fresh from our great experience at the Whitney, we resolved to try the Guggenheim, another "modern" museum of note. It was "pay what you wish" night, we chipped in a cautious $5 each, and left an hour later feeling we had been robbed. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is one of our favorites, we've been there a couple times or more, and are sure to return when we can. But not the Guggenheim in New York. Once in a lifetime is once too many. And Vicki has actually been twice!

Frank Lloyd Wright's "masterpiece": his monstrosity, some say; 
apparently no one showed FLW any pix of 5th Ave. nor of Central
Park for the new museum to "blend" into (think: Falling Waters);
he should have stuck with Prairie style; you're supposed to take the
elevator to the top and then spiral down, like a corkscrew, looking
at the "art"; alas the size and shape of the walls is quite restrictive... 

Interior, looking up; the lighting color changes periodically
(like Singapore) but the barrage of gibberish continues...

Pano of ground floor gibberish; designed to make you "think"...

Our main interest was the Thannhauser collection of
impressionist and post-impressionist art; here, Eduoard
Vuillard, two panels of Place Vintimille, 1909-1910; it
didn't help one's appreciation to learn that Thannhauser,
himself Jewish, as an art dealer had profited inordinately
from fellow Jews desperately fleeing Germany in the 30s;
there have been lawsuits and restitutions...

Picasso, Moulin de la Galette, 1900; 19 year-old Picasso: the guy could
paint!

Claude Monet, The Ducal Palace from San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908 

Manet, Woman in a Striped Dress, 1867; not your best
Manet, IMHO

Renoir, Woman with a Parakeet, 1871; Renoir before he was Renoir

Van Gogh, Landscape with Snow, 1888; among his first paintings
in Arles, finding his voice

Picasso, The Fourteenth of July, 1901; still Picasso before he was
Picasso

Cezanne, The Neighborhood of Jas de Bouffan, 1886

Cezanne, Bibemus, 1895-99; Bibemus was a quarry near Aix-en-Provence
that he frequented

So that was it for the more conventional art at the
Guggenheim; the next several floors were of contemporary
stuff such as the above

Leaking, like bedbugs, into adjacent spaces

Truly profound thought

More truly profound thought

No end to the bombardment of truly profound thought; what you're
not seeing is the upward spiraling of the truly profound thoughts

One art work took a collection of scores of Trump's Twits, printed 
them (as above), lined them up along 100 feet or more of the spiraling wall,
then had them falling into a heap of Twits

The crowd loved it

The Guggenheim must keep the AI gibberish-generators running
around the clock

Another floor or so was given to reminders of McCarthyism,
1984, Big Brother, etc.

Mercifully, there were many lengths of empty space

Actually, the gift shoppe was better than the museum itself